This overweening moral coxcombry is not indeed to be reckoned among the worst of crimes; but perhaps there is no other one fault so generally or so justly offensive, and therefore none so apt to provoke the merciless retaliations of mockery and practical wit.

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Maria, the little structure packed so close with mental spicery, has read Malvolio through and through; she knows him without and within; and she never speaks of him, but that her speech touches the very pith of the theme; as when she describes him to be one “that cons State without book, and utters it by great swaths; the best-persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellences, that it is his ground of faith that all who look on him love him.”  Her quaint stratagem of the letter has and is meant to have the effect of disclosing to others what her keener insight has long since discovered; and its working lifts her into a model of arch, roguish mischievousness, with wit to plan and art to execute whatsoever falls within the scope of such a character.  Her native sagacity has taught her how to touch him in just the right spots to bring out the reserved or latent notes of his character.  Her diagnosis of his inward state is indeed perfect; and when she makes the letter instruct him,—­“Be opposite with a kinsman, surly with servants; let thy tongue tang arguments of State; put thyself into the trick of singularity,”—­her arrows are so aimed as to cleave the pin of his most characteristic predispositions.

The scenes where the waggish troop, headed by this “noble gull-catcher” and “most excellent devil of wit,” bewitch Malvolio into “a contemplative idiot,” practising upon his vanity and conceit till he seems ready to burst with an ecstasy of self-consequence, and they “laugh themselves into stitches” over him, are almost painfully diverting.  It is indeed sport to see him “jet under his advanced plumes”; and during this part of the operation our hearts freely keep time with theirs who are tickling out his buds into full-blown thoughts:  at length, however, when he is under treatment as a madman, our delight in his exposure passes over into commiseration of his distress, and we feel a degree of resentment towards his ingenious persecutors.  The Poet, no doubt, meant to push the joke upon him so far as to throw our sympathies over on his side, and make us take his part.  For his character is such that perhaps nothing but excessive reprisals on his vanity and conceit could make us do justice to his real worth.

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